Capturing the calamitous tapestry of war

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Rick Atkinson left the Washington Post in 1999 “to raise my game, to become a historian and use the longer lens of history” to write about World War II in Western Europe. He didn’t know that it would be 14 years before he typed the final words of The Guns at Last Light, the brilliant,...

Audio Column by Sukey Howard

Rick Atkinson doesn't just make military history interesting, he makes it live, animated by the voices of the men who led, the men who died and the survivors who would never forget. In The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, the second volume of his Liberation Trilogy, Atkinson describes Operation HUSKY and Operation AVALANCHE, the controversial campaigns that ultimately...

America's first WWII battles

In a passage in Moby Dick, Herman Melville offered this counsel to other authors: "To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme." Rick Atkinson emphatically does both in his newest work, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943. This initial volume of his Liberation Trilogy covers the crucial first years of America's involvement in World War II, the most...